Tuesday, April 21, 2015

Expressing false sympathy with a person just before you attack them holds a special place in my worldview. People think such meaningless, obvious lies grant them the moral high ground. They think that by expressing their false sympathy they can avoid the problem of, as the Social Justice Warrior crowd calls it, "punching down".

In their own minds, such justifications might well let the abusers sleep at night. Meanwhile, the best case scenario is that their victims see through the facade, and worst case the attack is compounded by the obvious insinuation that the victim is in the wrong for being upset at someone who expressed "sympathy" for their plight.

This is a favorite tactic of bullies everywhere, and is never meant any more sincerely than an offer to call the whaaambulance. If you're genuinely sympathetic, you'll never utter this phrase.

"But what if the person is genuinely hard done by but is also legitimately acting inappropriately?" you may ask.

Then you call out the inappropriate behavior OR you express sympathy. You do one or the other, and you have to make a decision which is more important to you. Because I guarantee that no one has ever felt sympathy when it's coming from someone who's in the process of telling him/her off.